AFFECTIVE NARRATIVES

The notion ‘affective narratives’ captures the multidimensional entanglement of narrating and feeling in the political. Narratives recall memories, organize experiences, and (re-)imagine and legitimize politics. Yet, they are also affective. They help sort feelings and grasp atmospheres. They make emotional reactions recognizable and evoke political affects.  

In politics, storytelling emotionally binds voters to political programs. The notion ‘affective narratives’ emphasizes narratives as narrative practices and, thereby, moves beyond the idea that affects are merely politically instrumentalized. It also exceeds the juxtaposition of narratives as discursive and affects as bodily expressions, underscoring, instead, the narrativity of affects and the affectivity of narratives. 

In an analytical distinction, affective narratives highlight the affectivity of (1) the story told, (2) the audience addressed, and (3) the narrators. The stories told (1) evoke feelings by creating tension, presenting figures of identification, and generating emotions such as sympathy, love, fear, and hatred. Affective states can be directed toward stories, while stories themselves make atmospheres intelligible and organize belonging. For the audience addressed (2) affective narratives act as spaces of imagination, identification, and attachment. When people listen to stories, they affectively relate to them and integrate them into their own experiences. Narratives simultaneously absorb and shape the audiences’ moods. The narrators (3) also play a crucial role by framing affective orientations. Equally, they offer affective identifications through embodying their stories, for instance in cases of autobiographic storytelling.  

Affective narratives are a mode of mediation in the political, capturing moods, providing imaginaries, fostering identifications, and negotiating attachments. As such, they also contribute to better understanding populism. For instance, by telling a story of the people betrayed by the elites, populists address people’s affective states of insecurity and anxiety while simultaneously amplifying and legitimizing these feelings. Packaged in heroic stories of salvation, populists, here, present themselves as promises to restore sovereignty and political agency. 

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